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In his introduction to Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," Franklin Walker quotes Conrad as having once said, "A work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion" (viii). This article examines Conrad's statement from the points of view of three scholar critics - Hilton, Cole, and Barry - each of whom find separate "exclusive meanings" as well as attribute their own unique "symbolic character" to the novella.

The critic N. Hilton looks at Conrad as an author "obsessed with ambiguity, hypocrisy, and lies" (1). In his article Hilton offers a somewhat Freudian explanation of Conrad's continual use of the ambiguous and obscure. He cites Conrad's statement that "one's own personality is only a ridiculous and aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknown" (1) as both a reflection and a result of Conrad's childhood experiences and his unfortunate loss of both his parents at an early age.

Hilton develops his thesis with an almost psychoanalytic approach to Conrad's writing and again relies of Conrad's own words. For example, in one conversation with an old friend, Conrad provided insight on his writing technique: "(B)efore anything," Conrad confided, "switch off the critical current of your mind and work in darkness the creative darkness which no ghost of responsibility will haunt" (3). Moreover, Conrad writes, "all my work is produced unconsciously" (3). (The foregoing might explain why I had so much difficulty in reading "Heart of Darkness.")

Continuing along the Freudian vein, Hilton points out that after the death of Conrad's parents, Conrad felt that "their deaths emphatically cancelled all hope of security, stripping off my simple trust in the government of the universe'" (5). Hilton develops this notion of the loss of trust to Conrad's early conclusion "that someone was not telling the truth or that no one was or perhaps, finally that there was no truth" (5).

In the remainder of his article, Hilton evaluates Marlow's journey from the "light" of civilization to the "darkness" of Africa in search of Kurtz and his ultimate discovery of the essential hollowness of a soul teetering on emptiness and ambiguity. Hilton ends his article with what could be the most exquisite ambiguity of all, i.e., Marlow's "lie" to Kurtz's fianc. Marlow tells her that the last thing on Kurtz's lips was "your name." In fact, the last thing on Kurtz's lips was the famous exclamation, "The horror! The horror!" Perhaps the real horror

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